[mercury-users] C Interface (was Circular lists)

[Tyson Dowd]

On 27-Nov-1997, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok at cs.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> You apparently envisage checking arbitrary code;
> I envisage checking _checkable_ code.  If the code is for some reason
> impossible to analyse, that is in itself a danger sign.

Merely defining _checkable_ code and devising algorithms to check such
code sounds like a fairly substantial project.

It sounds like you'll be pretty much restricted to checking what
could be called "pure C". But "pure C" doesn't let you do anything you
can't do in Mercury anyway. We *need* the C interface to do things like
I/O, networking, IPC, graphics, pointer-manipulation, etc. 
The other thing we need the C interface for is accessing large libraries
of pre-written code, and it's almost certain that any large amount of
code will not be checkable.

This is just my opinion -- I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise.
Perhaps we have different ideas on what is checkable from such a tool,
and how large that checkable set needs to be before it is useful.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #         Linux versus Windows is a 
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        #            Win lose situation.
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